I want to say a few more things about my previous post. Namely, about context and the old children’s game of telephone.

First, in case it wasn’t clear my previous post was more specifically about sharing opinions than about just retweeting memes, jokes, cute dogs, inappropriate art that you regret because you forgot you’re on main, &c. Now, I still think it’d be better if we just had an easier more in-the-spirit-of-the-web form of just linking things to people rather than putting it on our own timeline/dash/feed, but I don’t think it’s going to create real problems.

What bothers me is how easy it is to share someone making claims, proclamations, &c. relative to writing your own thoughts. One of the problems I didn’t talk about much in the first post was that there’s a kind of semantic drift to retweets. Most posts on social media are made within a context: you’re speaking to from the perspective of knowing your own history, what things you’ve said before, and who is following you on that account. The people following you on that account also know at least some of your history, how you talk, what you talk about, and the scope of what you mean. But if those people retweet something, what of that context is still there? Probably some because there’s going to be some overlap in interests and perspectives, the ways people find people they have something in common with, but how many degrees do you need to go out before the original context is lost?

I don’t know if there’s a way to answer that question as I don’t know how to make it rigorous, but I have observed at least that it doesn’t take long before you really don’t know what someone means when you see an opinion shared in front of you.

For example, in these pandemic times it’s been hard to know what people mean when they’re declaring what you should & shouldn’t do. People will say things like “no you can’t go out how selfish are you?” and it sounds like they think you literally can’t be outdoors at all except they actually meant “go out (to bars)” not “go out(side)”. How would you know that, though, without some kind of other context.

That’s a pretty trivial example but if you don’t know what I mean I think you can just watch social media for awhile, note how often opinions/dictums/hot takes get shared where there’s actually some real ambiguity about what on earth that person means.

I think, though, that if we treated retweets more like copy-pasting links—where not including explanatory text is strange or rude—then it’d be easier to keep course-correcting the drift away from original meaning. Not that it wouldn’t shift, mind you, but rather that the shift would be understood.

I have a lot of the same criticisms of tumblr as I do of twitter but I think something that was absolutely wonderful about tumblr was the way that posts that went viral would contain these long chains of reblog comments that often tore down and rebuilt the meaning of the original post hundreds of times over and because of the ways divergences in reblog provenance would work you’d have plenty of times where “the same” post with different chains of comments would cross your path and they’d have entirely different feels, jokes, or points made.

The last thing I want to say is that I don’t think is an issue of personal morality. I’m not sitting here telling people “because you do straight retweets you’re awful”. My point is more about the decisions social media sites themselves have made and how they’ve created incentives and disincentives. The world is complex, our executive function is limited, and we’re basically all going to use tools in the ways they were made to be used. I don’t think that’s on us per se.